AdWords is a great place to waste money. Google makes it so easy — a few minutes of effort, and you are well on your way to giving them your whole marketing budget.

Fortunately, all that money doesn’t have to go to waste. With a bit of finagling, it’s relatively easy to figure out which search terms have value and which ones are money pits — if you know what you’re doing.

To make things easy, I’ve boiled this analysis down into a simple four-step process. To show how this process works in practice, I’ll also use a recent client case study to illustrate each step.

The Client

This client provides a fantastic example of how much money you can waste on AdWords without realizing it. After running this analysis on their account, it became clear that they were wasting $50,000/month on ads that never produced a single conversion!

The client had been managing their PPC accounts in house for years, and these accounts were actually generating quite a few leads. Unfortunately, despite their high customer lifetime value (LTV), their cost per conversion was so high that they weren’t making any money.

Before coming to me, they had tried increasing their budget by 30 percent to see if they could improve profitability, but additional unprofitable traffic doesn’t equal additional profit, so their account was still struggling.

It was clear they had a problem. Given their budget and profit margins, their campaigns should have been a success, but something just wasn’t working.

Sound familiar?

Let’s take a look at the four-step process and what it uncovered for this client.

About The Author

Jacob is passionate entrepreneur on a mission to grow businesses using PPC & CRO. As the Founder & CEO of Disruptive Advertising, Jacob has developed an award-winning and world-class organization that has now helped over 2,000 businesses grow their online revenue. Connect with him on Twitter.